A friend just wrote to ask if I’m playing STALKER yet (I’m not), recommending it for its atmosphere. That’s not the first mention I’ve heard of the game’s atmosphere, and I’m looking forward to picking it up as soon as I have time to give it proper attention.

In the mean time, I’ve been playing a free little game called Knytt. It was made by one person. It’s 2D, low res, and also surprisingly atmospheric. (Play full-screen, and with sound: is music always essential to atmosphere?) It’s hard to get a sense of it from screenshots, so I strongly recommend just downloading it. It takes a couple minutes to download and another minute to learn, and I really can’t recommend the game highly enough. It’s fantastic and astonishing.

Knytt’s author says he was inspired by Ico, Doukutsu Monogatari, Seiklus, and Shadow of The Colossus. (The two of those I’ve played certainly do interesting things with atmosphere.) Horror games live and die on the moods they create: Alone in the Dark and System Shock 2 are favorites of mine, though perhaps obvious. The Orisinal games succeed to various extents, primarily on the backs of their art and music combinations as opposed to anything the game does (though Raph Koster has written extensively about High Delivery).

This post is barely scratching the surface: there’s so much to explore, from what atmosphere in a game really is, what part of atmosphere is unique to games, to how to pull it off. I’m actually surprised that some games seem to do it so well: this is a part of the medium that some people seem to have an intuition for. What are some of your favorite atmospheric games? What games have pulled off a strong mood that you still remember today?

Next-Gen posted this rather amusing bug in the Oblivion expansion, Shivering Isles.  Apparently, some script is allocating a new ID number every frame (or some number of frames), and after 50-150 hours, depending on your frame rate, it just runs out of IDs for new objects.  The result: no more new items for you, buddy.

I’m a bit surprised that none of the testers for the expansion had saves with over 150 hours played.  Of course, in a testing environment, that’s a lot easier said than done: saves get invalidated; the bug might creep in in a later version; maybe the bug doesn’t even manifest in a save created with an earlier version.  It’s probably pretty safe to say that few games get the kind of hard core dedicated play time that Oblivion does.

As a web developer, sometimes (rarely!) you just can’t get around creating a popup. Maybe you want to be able to define some terms, and can’t use a floating div because of Internet Explorer z-order bugs. Perhaps your client just really, really wants one.

This simple request– make a popup– is actually much more difficult than it seems. Window size and positioning requirements frequently preclude the use of target=”_blank”. Once you move to Javascript, though, you run into browsers running sans Javascript, popup blockers, and search engine unfriendliness.

To anyone who’s been in web development for a while, this isn’t a surprise: almost any seemingly small task becomes a maze of browser incompatibilities, security settings, search engine optimization, user experience, accessibility for the blind, and on and on. You need a toolkit you can return to, or you’ll end up spending hours or days on every “minor” feature.

Accessify provides some great scripts and tips to augment your bag of tricks. Returning to the subject at hand, they have this extensive walk-through of their perfect popup script. Web developers: it’s probably better than whatever you’re currently using for popups, on those rare occasions you have to use them. Everyone else: it’s a frightening demonstration of how much thought goes into what, on first glance, looks like one line of code.

Gibbage.co.uk has re-launched as a provider of “games, T-shirts, mugs and other funky paraphernalia”. (Previously, it was the home of the 2D, over-the-top, cartoon deathmatch game of the same name.)

The twist is that all profits from Gibbage.co.uk are going to go to indie developers (selected, presumably, but site founder and owner Dan Marshal). To get a feel for the type of games he favors, check out the games promoted on the site: the idea is indie and new (as opposed to casual and cloned).

It’s a surprising idea: aside from some government programs and tax breaks, I’m really not familiar with any “indie patronage”. I imagine the site, pitch, and model may shift quite a bit as he looks for the best way to pull off a new venture like this, but I of course wish him the best of luck.

A friend’s just posted the fantastic LolCat Buildr.  Upload your own picture, punch in some text– instant lolcatz.  The best part is getting to view previous visitors’ contributions.  (Well, Ruth says the best part is being able to bestow the glamour of lolcats on your very own kitty.)  There are a couple with our own cats in there.